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While women’s entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a source of economic and social development, there is a persistent storyline that women entrepreneurs do not perform as well as their male counterparts, and research examining performance and growth shows inconclusive results regarding gender differences in performance and the causes of them. This introduction chapter defines programs, policies, and practices, and explains why they matter for understanding and stimulating higher levels of growth among women’s businesses. This chapter provides an outline for the book that is organized about three key themes that emerged from the research produced by the collaborators in this book: the practice of building networks, programs and the support environment, and policies and regulations. These three themes comprise the elements of our new framework for policies, programs and practices for high-growth women’s entrepreneurship.

Techno-entrepreneurship is defined as the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities of both incumbent and nascent companies operating in a technology- or knowledge-intensive environment that encourages and fosters the development and introduction of technology-based and knowledge-intensive novel products, services, production methods, or business models (Therin, 2009; 2014). It serves as an important conduit to firm growth, job and new industry creation, and economic development (Acs et al., 2016; Audretsch, 2007; Baumol, 2010; Carree and Thurik, 2003; Yoon et al., 2018). Despite its significant socio-economic and spillover effects across other constituents of the global economy, technoentrepreneurship entails high risk and uncertainty that are mainly derived from the fast and dynamically changing nature of technology. Drawing on dynamic and broad views on the phenomenon, this handbook aims to deepen our understanding of techno-entrepreneurship by proposing novel theoretical frameworks, introducing emerging categories of techno-entrepreneurship, and exploring new patterns in entrepreneurial ecosystems and across different countries by using a variety of unique data sources. First, current research is showing that new theoretical frameworks are needed in order to cope with the growing relevance of techno-entrepreneurship initiatives in different countries (Shan et al., 2018; Chaudhry et al., 2018; Judge et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2009; Venkataram, 2004; Phan and Der Foo, 2004; Baark, 1994). At the same time, we have relatively little understanding about emerging categories of entrepreneurship. Accordingly, we include a chapter dedicated to proposing new roles of technological embeddedness in techno-entrepreneurship, and explore relatively new categories of entrepreneurship that are closely related to reverse and frugal innovation, the drone industry, and gender-specific entrepreneurship.